Cancel All Your Meetings for 2023

Ever try this exercise? Envision a work world where there are no meetings. None.

What might that be like? Freeing? Awesome? Isolating? Troublesome?

In a no-meeting world would team members just float about without direction, chasing random shiny things or would we be OK? Would problems get solved anyway or would we drift rudderless through the workweek?

Highly effective teams have a critical look at all meetings on their calendars and make crucial decisions about which to keep and which to jettison. In the spirit of starting fresh in the new year, our leadership suggestion is to have a careful and critical look at your calendar and how it can serve the team rather than the team serving the calendar.

A careful and critical look at meetings might include these questions:

• Can we live without this meeting? Is this a strategic, planning, informational or social team-building necessity? Or is the meeting, that is holding a place on our calendar, a leftover from days gone by lacking functional necessity?
• How do we solve problems? (Any good meeting solves a problem.) Does the get-together move us forward by solving common and well-understood problems? Are the problems to be solved clearly articulated or are we setting up an “ain’t it awful” conversational exercise?
• Is the meeting supposed to be Social/Strategic/Informational/Tactical? If it is many or all these things, we risk making a meeting “stew” that suffers from lack of focus. Many of our members in production work have regular and effective “stand-up” meetings, usually 7 minutes or less, with a short agenda. Strategic and tactical time might be set aside from the production schedule to dig in with more depth on key themes for success in the coming quarter. All industries might benefit from this kind of approach.
• Are asynchronous meetings an option? Especially with remote or hybrid workplaces, we have seen many of our members embrace information sharing that does not require all of us, in perhaps different time zones, to carve out a shared time to meet. Success with asynchronous meetings requires someone to ensure consistency and redundancy of communication, but many groups are reporting an improved fluidity and effectiveness when avoiding passive, gotta-show-up meeting time.
• What works for the team? If we are truly being careful and critical about our meetings we will check with the team. Not just “how do you like our meetings?” but a deeper investigation of what works to empower individuals in ways they like to be empowered. Even though we are big on coaching and mentoring at Cascade Employers Association, we find that an individualized approach to finding greatness works best.

Here is wishing you great collaborations this year!